Some types of printing devices employ one or more laser beams to selectively expose, on a scan line-by-scan line basis, positions on a photosensitive surface in correspondence with an image to be printed. Some types of laser beams, such as those commonly used within a printing device employing more than one laser beam, can have beam cross-sectional irradiance distributions that are elliptical in shape. When such laser beams pass through an aperture, unintended and undesirable side lobes may be created within the focused spot irradiance distributions at the image surface. These side lobes can deleteriously affect the image quality of the resulting image that is printed using the printing device in question.